


Stop All The Clocks

by bluebloodbruise



Category: Call Me By Your Name (2017), Call Me By Your Name - All Media Types
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-08
Updated: 2017-12-08
Packaged: 2019-02-12 06:07:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,397
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12952977
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bluebloodbruise/pseuds/bluebloodbruise
Summary: "First love, overstaying its welcome, has turned you equal parts saccharine and bitter.So when he kneels in front of you and pushes your shorts down, ring finger leaving bloody imprints on your waistband, you know he knows better than anyone that you are hurting in this indelible, unresolved way that is made of self-loathing and anger and tenderness.Your eyes lock, and he asks in his most polite library voice, 'Can we do this too?' and you want to say no, or maybe you want to say, 'We can do anything when we are together.' "





	Stop All The Clocks

**Author's Note:**

> Ah this had no business existing but now it does. One of those things. 
> 
> I deliberately didn't name the characters so you can read it either way-- Elio/Oliver, Timmy/Armie--though there are clear clues on who the POV belongs to by the end.

So this is how first love feels, you muse absently.

The late-afternoon sun bounces off the still water, making it white and brittle like glass. The air is golden with fresh cut grass and sweat, condensation gathering around the rim of your beer and making the bottle sticky.

There is nothing remarkable about the end of Summer but the fact that comes and gives way to Fall, or at least there used not to be. But now that has changed. It has been changed by the way the blush light hits the curve of his jaw, the back of his arms and thighs, the inside of his wrists, as he flexes his muscles and jumps into the green pond, pierces through the moss, and stretches on the shore, all wet sunlight and poorly kept secrets. 

Secretly, you call him the “Heartbreaker.”

The Heartbreaker reminds you of a pocket made of loose stitches, an heirloom rough under patina, something you could rub off until it comes, reveals its hidden shine, golden, always golden, everything about him is so golden you feel your blood oxidize in its presence.

He disappears underwater, sullen now. You wonder if your gaze has soured the mood, if it’s terribly juvenile to do this, let beer grow warm as you sit in a lawn chair and think “there there,” looking at a man so far beyond your reach and so deeply burrowed inside your groin. It shouldn’t matter, and it doesn’t, until it’s nightfall and he knocks at your door, slightly tipsy and unwieldy in his size, perennially skittish of his own amusement, or is it wary of your earnest desire? You can’t tell. You sip your stale beer and watch him disappear among the fruit trees, head hanging low, almost shyly. 

Soon, you think, soon, all this will fade. 

\---

Though you tell yourself not to, you do: you hope, you labor, you preen. You light up candles everywhere in your small high-ceiling apartment, white and red on bookcases and tables and nightstands. When he asks, you mutter something about meditation, about light sensitivity, a headache. The Heartbreaker doesn’t press then, but later he presses into you, just the length of his shoulder, elbow, arm at first, sitting on a scruffy velvet couch side by side, but as you lean into it, it extends to include hip, thigh, knee, and you tell yourself not to turn, don’t move, keep your body as shuttered as your face, but there there, you do and now you can feel the drumming of his chest under yours, his nose against your throat, and suddenly you are both mumbling “too many clothes,” “yes that, too much of that,” “no, not enough,” “more?,” “yes, please, more,” and it is all things considered mild and maybe even recommended, that you learn how to curve into each other this effortlessly, but once there is more skin than space, you cannot tell anymore, the difference between rehearsing and living, now and the rest of your life. 

You sink into him, the smell, the feel, the warmth of skin mixed with burning wax and briny red wine. You think, “I will think about this later,” even as you hope that later will never come.

\---

For him everything is halted, slow and then rushed, a streak of abandonment mixed with a moment of introspection. Sex—or the presage of sex you keep working towards but never fully realizing—travel, music, food, work, pleasure, pain, everything jumps and flutters without sticking. You don’t know if you love that about him, or if you love him and that is what he is about.

What you do know is that you think of fucking him in between takes, in between breaks, in between meals, so much so that this in-between becomes the space where you live now. You’ve taken residence there, in that ghostly place where there’s heady lust wrapped around something else, something deeper, furrier, that you don’t know yet how to unpack.

So you hold still and smile, push your knees together, as if not going all the way is really going to keep time at bay, you on course, him within your reach. 

That night, you unplug both your phones and say, “let’s go to bed.” He is so close when he comes out for air and leans his head against the upholstery, his face blushed and clouded by apprehension. You hold his hand and press it to your lips, trying to remind him that you are aware, remind yourself that it won’t matter, it will be like any great first experience, fleeting and glorious because of its ephemerality. A golden memory from a golden time.

He kisses your fingers in return, but his brow doesn’t unfurl. So you stand up and walk to the bedroom, lie down in the humid darkness, wait for him to join you. 

When he doesn’t, you lie awake waiting for the front door to click shut. It never does. 

In the morning, you wake him up with mediocre coffee and fresh cannoli. Throughout breakfast, as you huddle in your tiny kitchen table, he complains that his back hurts, that your couch is a sadistic torturer. You kiss the powdered sugar off his lips and he smiles, beautifully, openly, from under his lashes. His bare feet tap against yours, a toe running up the length of your tendons.

Truce, then. You fall in love a little bit more.

\---

The days are growing shorter, helplessly so. The sky feels it, the animals feel it, the locals feel it. All gains an edge of urgency all of a sudden. 

Time scurries around. Insomnia comes because you stay awake thinking, trying to piece together how did this happen, to track the before and after, the exact moment the “you” you thought you knew stumbled into this other version, restless, fearful, and wanting. 

It seems simultaneously too late and too soon for you, as if early in your young years was already beyond the point of return. You can’t start over when you have already gone halfway, right?, you ponder as you chain-smoke on a balcony in the absolute stillness of rural 2am. 

You think of calling home, checking in with those who should know you best, could offer guidance out of a maze of your own making. But you don’t. Because talking would be like spreading a virus, spill oil into the water, poison everything with a black slickness you do not know how to contain or absorb. 

“What you doing up?,” his voice suddenly trickles from inside the house, cottony with sleep, his body pliant and feverish as he wraps naked limbs and chest around your back until you cannot tell where his skin begins and yours end. “Come back to bed,” he sighs into your shoulder.

And as you turn to look at his face, aqueous under the slanted moonlight, you can’t help but whisper, “You are a heartbreaker, you know?” to which he giggles, kissing your breastplate and pulling the cigarette from your fingers. 

“Better that than a heartthrob,” he quips, before throwing the scorched filter away into the dark night. 

\----

By dawn, you have licked sweat off every vertebra on his spine, brushed his hair off his face so you can look straight at his eyes when you press into each other, breathlessly, a tad scared but also familiar with this burn you’ve decided not to quench. Limbo fits you, you lie, even when he drags your head down to his and stutters, eyes closing, voice catching in a pointless effort to keep it casual, “You can if you want. I will let you. If you want.”

You want to say, “I love you. I am stupidly, preposterously, impossibly in love with you.” But as your body begins to shake at the seams, an unbound and trigger-happy thing, you whisper instead, “Heartbreaker” in his ear, and he half-moans half-laughs, struggling to utter your name and ultimately failing. 

\----

It becomes a joke around town. Everyone alternates between calling you two “heartbreaker” and “heartthrob.” He snickers and bows to the dubious compliment with gallant grace. You share everything with him now, names and memories and childhood secrets that you thought no one would ever want to keep. But he does, with a gravity that you recognize must have been earned not given. 

He has become your warden, your partner, your foil. You see yourself in him, a past and a possible future version, like nursery friends reunited in adult life. When you kiss him, you kiss yourself too, and it thrills you like no one ever thrilled you before. 

One afternoon, you sit under the trees, his head on your shoulder in a genuine moment of public intimacy, books scattered around fallen leaves and rotten peaches. You run your fingers through his hair, trying to kid yourself that you are not thinking of ways to stay here indefinitely, in this fading summer, stretch a memory to the point where it becomes real again, a strange process of reincarnation. 

You could become an adult with him, or you could remain young forever through him. Ether way, you can’t overcome him, you know that now. You can only accept yourself. 

\---

That night, as if sensing your earlier thoughts, he undresses you right at the door, quick and too intent, his hands catching on your belt and cutting his ring finger. The air is thick with grief and ash. You lit incense this time. You put Rachmaninov on, a terrible sentimental thing by Gluck about mourning and loss. 

First love, overstaying its welcome, has turned you equal parts saccharine and bitter, so when he kneels in front of you and pushes your shorts down, finger leaving bloody imprints on your waistband, you know he knows better than anyone that you are hurting in this indelible, unresolved way that is made of self-loathing and anger and tenderness. 

Your eyes lock, and he asks in his most polite library voice, “Can we do this too?” and you want to say no, or maybe you want to say, “We can do anything when we are together,” but Rachmaninov swallows up whatever you intended to speak, so your silence is taken as consent. 

His mouth is full of despair, fast and sloppy, in tempo with your arousal and Rachmaninov's precise hands, and maybe that is why, afterwards—as he pulls off his shirt to brush his lips clean, and collapses on the crimson carpet with his head on your lap—(maybe because you think you caught in him a whiff of the same brand of panicked yearning that haunts you), you can’t keep from saying out loud, in a strangled voice that surprises you, “Please let me keep you. Please. Just. Let me keep you.” 

And just like that, the spell is broken, the fairytale of synchronicity and union woven together by the scented smoke and the sad music dispelled. His nose wrinkles in that expressive way he has to convey confused distaste, and you remember that inexperience has his price. It is your first time doing _this_ after all (young love, Italy, men, displayed vulnerability, cheating), you don’t know how to do it successfully, tactfully—not yet. 

He begins to push up on his elbows, and automatically you put your hand on his bare ribcage and press him down. Defiantly, he regards your splayed hand, then your eyes, as if attempting to read what might be there, hidden from sight. He doesn’t struggle to get up, but when he speaks, you know something cracked. “How can you ask me that?,” he says, “How can you ask me for something beyond my control like that?”

It is the closest you come to implode. Fear floods your body with an acrid stink, sharper than the incense. You wonder if he can smell it. For a moment, his disappointment is so strong, you expect him to wrestle out of your hold, walk out and never look at you again. Instead he folds his elbows back to the carpet and takes a deep breath. You see your hand move up and down on his chest, his body relaxing under your grip. You say it then, of all god’s given moments, a useless band-aid on a shattered bone: “I love you.”

He has covered his eyes with a forearm, his bloody finger crusted brown against his naked skin. “I know,” he sighs. There: now he knows, and so do you. Nothing changed, and yet nothing feels quite the same either.

You capitulate then, slipping your hand to the carpet. You curl around his body, kissing his hair, puling him flush against your side. “You are mine heartbreaker,” you say as you fade to sleep, but because you mumble against his jaw, it comes out more as “you are my heartbreak,” which is a much simpler and poignant truth. 

\---

Every now and then, there are spontaneous midnight gatherings in the backyard with fairy-lights and punch bowls. It feels youthful even to someone young, like the perfect combination of elements that compose a snapshot memory of coming of age. Warm weather, free drinks, pretty well-mannered people. 

You stay on the fringes of a makeshift dance floor, a cement square on the grassy lawn where girls in colorful dresses wave their arms around each other. Happily, drunkenly. There is no desire for movement in you. For once, you are so weighed down by emotion you can only sit still. 

You can see him standing in the distance though, sharing drinks with some women in plaid skirts. There have been no more shared breakfasts, no more late-night conversations, not since you woke up alone on the floor of your apartment, your fly undone, your skin tacky with bloodstains and semen. There was no note either, no fumbled excuses. 

He holds your gaze every day, glides smoothly through his lines, a practiced ease in your shared intimacy. If he is discomfited or harboring a grudge, he does not show it. For the first time since you met him, you wonder if all between you has been a rouse, a smart ploy to fuel his performance, perfect it to the point where life and fiction have completely dissolved into raw emotion. The idea fills you with dread but also freedom. If he has to break your heart let it be that clean, that calculated, that easy to dismiss. You can survive deceit, you can weaponize that much more readily than longing. 

Longing is quicksand, it holds you down while it eats you up.

Somewhere in the midst of gin tonics and maudlin exhaustion, you find yourself on the edge of the dance floor, surrounded by girls who dance cheek to cheek even when a big band is playing on the radio. You are not dancing as much as swaying and smiling at whatever comments the girls joyfully throw out. You hold their hands in a loose daisy-chain. For an instant it is just beautiful: their tousled hair and lipsticked mouths, their garbled voices rising under the starry sky. 

It changes when you feel the weight leaning on your back, and the hands lacing over your stomach. It changes because it is not merely beautiful anymore, but sharp in a sort of painful way, like staring directly at the sun. It pricks your eyes. As you turn in his arms, you can feel the drunkenness seeping out of his body, his limbs lax and hot, his eyes too bright, almost teary.

“Too much to drink?” you ask offhandedly. “Want me to drive you home?” 

He shakes his head against your shirt, his hands pressing against the small of you back. He sways and so you sway too. There’s something charming about following his lead even when his eyes are closed and his brain is likely silent, but he still holds the power to command a dance. The girls hoot at the odd image you two must cut, and you reluctantly drop your hands to his waist, feigning a long-suffering eye-roll. As if reflexively, he tightens the grip on your spine, folds further into your hips, your chest, until you feel every point of warmth along your bodies, including his arousal. You startle, ramrod straight and fearful others around you can see it, see in plain moonlight what you do in the shadows. However, when you steal a glance around, the girls are gone, having scattered into the dance floor, leaving you two swooning on the margins. Everyone else is distracted. 

You hear him exhale deeply into the hollow of your throat, and just like that, your shoulders sag around him, a coil unspooled magically by the ease of his breathing.

A muscle memory alerts you to stay aloof, to show maturity through levelheadedness, yet once he rises his head and looks you in the eye, his fingers tracing your cheekbones slow and steady, it all withers. It hits you with the same force it did weeks prior that this must, has to be, how savage, sundering love feels like, first or last being indifferent: immobilizing and unstoppable, a touch of abyss in its core.

A curling grin colors his features making him seem boyishly dangerous. “What are you thinking in that formidable head of yours?,” he asks without halting the slow shuffle of your bodies. 

“You,” you blurt out helplessly. And then, because if you've fallen down a rabbit hole of unflappable honesty might as well go out with a bang, “And W. H. Auden.”

“Auden?” he says with his scrunched nose of discord. “Why on earth not Rimbaud?”

You laugh into his hair, breathe him in, and pull him closer and closer still, before reciting to the bright spot above his head: “Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone/Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone/Silence the pianos and with muffled drum./Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.”

His mirth ripples through his chest cavity, thrumming under your thumbs, “You’re so morbid.”

“You love it,” you counter lightly.

“That I do,” he states, his tone so terribly final it makes you falter. With the same brisk finality, he holds up your jaw with both hands and kisses you full on the mouth. You imagine a tiny ripple of gasps bursting all around you, but it could as easily be cicadas. For an instant, the kiss is hesitant, nearly immobile. Then, almost simultaneously (him first by a second or less) you both sink into it, with the trepidation and familiarity of old dance partners falling into a beloved step routine. The kiss drags until it splinters, quicker brushes truncated by the giggly excitement of risking such an open display of intimacy. 

You have kissed into his smile before, but this is entirely different. There is a steely certainty in it, as if instead of holding your lips, he was holding your hand in a viselike grip. “I am not letting you go,” he telegraphs with his pressure, his tongue, his spit. And it seemed inevitable, with hindsight, that that was how you would relinquish any measure of control, of distance, of boundaries between you. 

Gently, you move your hands to his shoulders, your mouth to his ear. His smile rings inside your veins, wades into your bloodstream, full and dark. “Yes,” you say in a rush. “Please.”

His eyes smack into yours, a burst of light and depth not unlike water hit by sunlight. “Okay,” he replies after a moment of hard scrutiny. “Okay, let’s go.” 

\---

The truth is, it did not happen as you had often fantasized, idle and loving in a crescendo of power and pleasure. Instead, fueled by alcohol and impatience, it resembled a windstorm, picking up speed and force as it went along, shoving any obstacle in its path. Your bodies, it seemed, cared little for complex human emotion. Clothes were ripped, buttons popped, shoes untied clumsily, the grinding of bones so loud they almost outlasted the noise on flesh on flesh. You tore his lip before you crossed the threshold to his apartment (closer, convenience being of highest priority), and he threw you so hard against a side table that a bruise swelled up on the spot. “It hurts,” you said and, looming half naked, he replied with a smile “maybe it should,” before you tackled him to the bed and pulled all garments, sheets, and covers out of the way. A bare mattress seemed fitting, a clean slate, a thing none of you knew what to do with. 

It had been naive to think that by keeping some clothing between you a sense of decency was preserved, lust purged from the bond you forged, all neatly belted by the plausible deniability of juvenile curiosity and rowdy loneliness. 

No no no, it had been more before, but with full nakedness came an overwhelming vulnerability, so you gasped when your groins slammed together, reminding you that bare skin held its own brutal kind of power. Suddenly it dawned on you that you couldn’t stop this even if you wanted, that this was an unerasable line, he will be yours after this, you think terrified, genuinely terrified now, before it was jitters, now it’s full-blown panic, because if it sticks, _if he sticks to you_ , how do you move forward, what if nothing feels good or tastes right after you do this to him and he does this to you? 

You start shaking, and as his fingers dig into your shoulders, you notice that he is shaking too, and you want to say “it’s fine, it’s fine, we can stop,” but lying seems beneath you now, seen as you are pressed on a bare mattress together, so instead you gather him up and kiss his forehead and say violently sincere, “I love you, not in a nice way, but in a ‘stop all the clocks’ way,” so that when he fumbles to wrap his legs around your waist, you just can’t help repeating, “I will stop all the clocks for you, I will stop all the clocks for you, if you want, I will, I will, I will stop all the clocks for you if you ask,” over and over again as you nuzzle into his neck, his collarbone, and sex happens more because you are a heap of raw skin rubbing against surrender than because of your exposed flesh, though that helps, it definitely helps, even if what you accomplish is so tame by comparison, so childishly tentative and messy, with slippery hands and aborted thrusts, and a buzzy sense of hangover already at the edges of your consciousness as you fall apart panting wordlessly, limbs soft and spread wide, your eyes unfocused and slightly shell-shocked with how fast it all unfolded, months shrunken into maybe thirty minutes of incandescent clarity, and now possibly sublimated into a lifelong memory.

Sleep is upon you too quickly for any lasting conclusions to be drawn, but before slipping out of reach, you can feel his hand slipping into yours, tugging it, and carefully tucking it under his cheek. You shape you mouth to say his name but what comes out instead is your own. 

\---

In the morning, when the sun is barely a hint in the horizon, you look at red light bleed over his sleeping body, giving him life through color. 

You think of Auden in the silent stillness before you fully accept time has moved on from night and now it’s here, that bewildering land we call “afterward.” If you had set to stop all the clocks, then it seems like you might have failed. 

To be fair, you never thought you’d ever find yourself here again, in the wild unknown. Not so soon anyway. Maybe after decades and through widowhood, but not like this, a thunder clap in your young adult years. 

But there there, it is what it is. Better face it than fight it. 

You think of Auden again, and the lines you didn’t say because you couldn’t, you couldn’t allow them to become attached to you two then because, well, because before there was refuge in words like infatuation and friendship, but now it’s too late for that comfort. Now you are stripped bare under the morning light and your body can be covered but not reupholstered. Your skin is steeped in bruises you can’t keep, but will not let fade away.

You think of Auden as you stir instant coffee into two mugs, one black, another brimming with cream. Think if you should write them down in a letter or say them out loud over fresh bread, or maybe underline them in a book and mail them in years-time, a memento or an invitation, you cannot yet know. It’s all too fastidiously formal at best, but so are truth and facts, like roadmaps and history books. Or so you tell yourself.

You settle for writing the verses on the back of an old receipt, your handwriting not as steady as you’d like but still serviceable. When you are done, the sun came out and the note reads: “He was my North, my South, my East and West,/My working week and my Sunday rest,/My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;/I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong./The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;/Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;/Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood./For nothing now can ever come to any good.”

Neatly folded, you place the piece of paper next to the coffee mug on his nightstand. He hums in his sleep when he feels you leaning closer, his face automatically perched to be kissed. “Sleep, it’s early still,” you murmur before obliging quickly. You pick up a blanket from the floor and cover his naked legs before leaving. 

The air is crisp, the sky milky with lazy warmth. You can smell him on your skin, inside and out. It hurts still, you realize, to want. To be so intimate with someone you could rearrange his internal organs with your eyes closed. 

So this is how first love hurts, you think, as you thought so many other thoughts that morning, the immense clarity of having seen something through frightful, but also strengthening. You wish for the absolute first time that you had known this feeling before having married, fathered children, embarked on a life that having bolstered you, also aged you. 

You think of rebirth and ruin and Rome, in an oddly apropos way, as you walk aimlessly under the hot Italian sun. Fear, you think, holds little power once you decided to burn the world down. 

And now that you did, you realize absently, you feel free.

\---

In the following days, the blush of certainty grows fainter under strain, as you find him scarce, rushing out with other people so he is never alone with you. It stings, but you gather it should since you are still someone else’s husband (and _there's_ a bonfire waiting to be ignited, you think as you begin counting the hours before returning home).

The lines crossed between you and him were always as much of life as of loss. But as you skeet dangerously close to pining, you begin revising your choices, oblique and hasty as they may have been. You thought he’d understand, the impetus to tear things down at the same time you own up to the danger in them. But maybe he didn’t. Maybe he is as young as he looks, after all.

On the last day of summer, he calls out your name when you are walking back home. “I got you something,” he pants catching up to you, hands on his knees, and you have to look away because looking at him now is knowing what it tastes like the curve of his jaw, the back of his arms and thighs, the inside of his wrists. 

The sun is too warm and the air smells like curdled milk. You have nothing left to give, no part of you having been left unturned. 

“Sure, what is it?” you say curtly, swatting flies away. His cheeks are bright pink from running when he pulls a small bundle of paper from his pocket. He hesitates, smoothing the crumpled tissue paper. You can see his coltish handwriting peeking from inside, as if he had balled up the writing in anger. 

“Here,” he mutters, eyes on his sneakers. “It’s nothing major, just a souvenir I guess.” 

When you nod and turn to move away, he startles you with a hand on your wrist. A firm and decided hold. “No. You have to open it now.”

There is no polite way to tell someone that loving them makes you angry, so you decide to relent and unwrap the damn gift there, careful to keep the scribbled paper intact. He stands beside you, eyes averted, patiently set on waiting. Breathing him in hurts your throat, but you pulse it down, until you regard the round face looking back at you, motionless and crooked, the hands telling no time. They are stilled at 6:30—in the morning, if you were to deduce, if he is as cunning as you always suspected he was. 

“It’s a broken watch?,” your comment tilts into a question at the end. 

“Hmm hmm,” he hums nonplussed, eyes still on the dirt road.

“You want me to have a broken wristwatch,” you repeat morosely, patience short under the ruthless heat. 

“Well, technically it’s a stopped watch. You can wind it anytime you want. It will start going again once you do.”

Torn between annoyance and yearning, you take some forceful strides forward. This time he lets you go. Maybe half a mile down the road, you remember the writing. It’s only a few lines scribbled in blue ball-pen. When you turn around, you find him standing exactly on the same spot, only now he is staring directly at the sun, his hands placidly linked behind his back. 

“ ‘Because I could not stop for Death/He kindly stopped for me/The Carriage held but just Ourselves/And Immortality,’” you read before reaching him.

“It’s Emily Dickinson,” he says flatly.

“I know.”

He directs his gaze at you now, bold and hard with a touch of youthful hurt that is not unlike that of reckless determination. 

“So now you know better.” 

You would laugh at his brashness if you weren’t quietly threatened by it. 

“Know what?,” and most of your lackadaisical tone is a front that you suspect, by the way he twitches his nose, can be smelled from ten feet away. Your heartbeat soars, high on fear, hope, and longing, welts surely crimson on your cheeks.

“Not to jilt me with borrowed words.” He touches his ring finger to your mouth, traces the stubble around your bottom lip. “I stopped the clock for you. Now we have all the time in the world.” 

The cut around his phalange is still visible, a thin white line. You let him press it against your lips, a plea as much as a demand. 

“Okay,” you answer, voice wavering with a wacky cocktail of emotions—a quarter part relief, half nausea, a sliver of awe. “Yes, okay.”

Whipped up into motion, he stalks to bridge the distance between your bodies, pulls the watch from your grip and defiantly loops it around your wrist. “With this band I wed thee,” he states matter-of-fact, letting your arm fall down. “There. You are mine now.” 

His quicksilver eyes hold an additional rim of gold, you are sure of it, when he distractedly nuzzles into your side, taking your hand into his. 

\--- 

 

At the edge of town, you think to ask belatedly, “Till death do us part?” 

Night has fallen sparsely, stars and purple clouds scattered around trees and houses like crowns. 

Slowing down to a halt, he tilts his chin up towards the West. “Or we make death stop for us. Either way.”

He looks so confident right there and then, wild hair and fiery eyes under the sheltering sky, you cannot steal that absoluteness from him. It would feel too much like stealing dreams from a child. 

So, instead, you bow down to kiss his open mouth, wondering absently if this is how first love feels when you stop it short from spoiling into heartbreak.

**Author's Note:**

> Rachmaninov plays from Gluck-Sgambati's "Orfeo ed Euridic:"
> 
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TIkhkzXr_DM


End file.
